I arrive in Chicago just after noon on Friday the 13th. Nah, I’m not superstitious. But knowing that my journey was to begin on Friday the 13th helped me remember to get all that accumulated work done so I would be ready to travel. The flight left San Francisco at 6am – so Thursday nightconsisted of packing and a little over 3 hours’ sleep, and then up at 3:45 for the ride to the airport. San Francisco International airport is actually a pretty civilized place at 4:30 in the morning – people are drowsy and polite. The lines are tolerable, especially for the self-check-in, meaning that I could walk right up to a kiosk, punch the touch-screen with my finger a few times and I was ready to go within a minute.
Having spent the first half of my years in Chicago, I was used to the flight. Kind of like commuting. Chicago is so central to the US that it’s a perfect base of operations – you can get anywhere in the country in 4 or 5 hours. Of course, I measure flight length in terms of “computer battery capacity.” This is a one-and-a-half-battery flight, as measured by my current Mac Powerbook. Day flights are “longer” because I have to keep the display brightness cranked up (draining the battery faster), whereas night flights measure shorter because I can dim the screen, thus saving the battery. I can squeeze three hours out of a single battery on a night flight.
“Pervasive Games” are games that are played out in real life, but directed by an unseen presence which in our case is a computer program. (There are lots of forms of pervasive games – many involved real life puppet masters, who work behind the scenes to invent (on-the-fly) new puzzles and to adapt the game to those who are playing it. Some games are one-time-only, designed for a group who will play the game and then it’ll never be played again – we designed and played one of these one-timers in Palo Alto this summer. Red7 pervasive games are based on a complex piece of software that runs on our servers, and is driven by a game scenario, composed of a set of rules that the software uses to determine what the players do at each step along the way.
My old computing and camping buddy, Bill, picks me up, and as we drive from O’Hare airport to the game site on North Michigan Avenue, I begin my planning. I bring a camera so I can take photos during the afternoon. I expect to conduct a “scouting” trip this afternoon, walking the grid of streets near the focus of the game (the Chicago Water Tower, a structure from the 1860s), taking photos everywhere, so that I can begin constructing a route for players.
As a San Franciscan, of course, it had escaped my notice that since the game is to be played beween November and March, the Chicago streets are likely to be at least wet, and perhaps even slushy when the gamers are playing. Chicago is called The Windy City, and today it lives up to its name – blowing sand in my eyes, causing me to lean at a precipitous angle to cross the street against the wind. And I know that when the temperature is 20F this game had better be short or people will just not want to play it. So I adjust my initial desire for a long 45-minute game down to something that could be played in less than half an hour will include some indoor stops to warm up.
I take about 150 photos as I conduct my scouting trip. Along the way we spend time talking with people and we gain some insight into the area, and one garrulous gentleman suggests that we also check out Millennium Park (some distance away) where there are some interesting outdoor artworks. We decide, however, that the distance would be too much for a winter game.
My buddies and I stop for pizza at Geno’s East, which has just returned to its (famous) site after being “away” for over five years. And then back to the crash pad in Evanston for the night.
On Saturday, I’ve had a chance to review the scouting information and have made a few plans. So this time the routine is to “walk the route” that I’ve planned, checking out time and distance, and trying to work up puzzles, clues and answers, from among the sites that I scouted yesterday. Deciding that there is indeed enough for a four-puzzle game, we head for Millennium Park to see The Bean and other attractions. On the train, on the way back to Evanston from this run-thru, I have time to try writing rhyming puzzles for the game. I am not very satisfied with the results, but I have a sheet of paper covered with half-baked attempts.
Sunday morning arrives and I realize that my plans for a leisurely Sunday simply must evaporate because otherwise I won’t get the game completed. I spend the morning polishing the poetic puzzles – I had toyed with the idea of using limericks, then haiku, but decided in the end to just make them silly rhymes. Which I did.
And then the final step is to “code” the rules that drive the game, into the server. And then test the game using my cell phone. The games are all played out using SMS (“text messaging”) and players receive the puzzles as SMS messages, to which they respond using SMS. My test is successful and I only have to make a couple of changes. I then record an in-game telephone message (at 312.924.1899) and the game is ready to play. Just in time – I have 15 minutes to spare for packing before I have to head for the airport for my next flight.
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